THREE:And they proceeded to tell her a number of stories, many of which she did not believe, until she found out to her cost that they were true; but which, nevertheless, filled her mind with uneasy suspicions; while her mother sat by with tears in her eyes, repenting of the new folly by which she had again ruined the happiness of her child.
THREE:
THREE:I do not believe one word of your opinions. I am like Molire, I would rather appeal to my servant, but as she is not here I will, if you do not object, ask that young man, who does not look like a flatterer: he will tell us the truth. And turning to him, she saidCountless were the inconsistencies of the faddists of the party to which she belonged, and in the crotchets of which she had educated her daughter, but what duty or reason or satisfaction could there be in such a calculation as this?
TWO:Before parting, after a month spent together, the three sisters composed a beautiful litany to be said by them in remembrance of their mother, sister, and grandmother. It opened with that sublime passage of scripture beginning with the words, The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God; there shall no torment touch them.
TWO:In the latter part of the summer of 1792 she was in Paris, which, in spite of her revolutionary professions, was no safe abode even for her, certainly not for her husband. The slightest sympathy shown to an emigr, a priest, a royalist, or any one marked as a prey by the bloodthirsty monsters who were rapidly showing themselves in their true colours, might be the death-warrant of whoever dared to show it. So would any word or gesture of disapproval of the crimes these miscreants were ordering and perpetrating. Their spies were everywhere, and the least accusation, very often only caused by a private grudge, was enough to bring a person, and perhaps their whole family, to prison and the scaffold. In the early days of the Terror, the well-known actor Talma, hearing an acquaintance named Alexandre, a member of his own profession, giving vent in a benign voice to the most atrocious language of the Terrorists, indignantly reproached him.